I went back to Jeff's website and reread the section on making the dough. I don't know if using the Caputo flour you have will produce a Patsy's-like crust and flavor but Jeff does indicate that it can be used in his dough formulation, but with a lower hydration than he uses for bread or other flour. The Caputo 00 flour you have is the correct flour, however.

From rereading Jeff's dough making section I don't see any reason why you can't use the Caputo flour and fresh yeast, or any other form of yeast for that matter. But you should follow the precise steps recited and not freelance until you become more proficient with your dough making. I would use a lower hydration, however, because of the flour itself and because you will be using a home oven. I have found that I can use around 60% hydration with the Caputo 00 flour but even if you go to 58-59% I think you should be OK. It is important if you decide to use fresh yeast again to be sure that it is properly and completely dispersed within the dough. I would do this by dissolving the fresh yeast in the water, since the water will permeate everything in the dough.

When the dough is done, I would lightly oil the finished dough balls and put them in suitable containers such as Jeff uses or anything comparable. I would give the dough balls at least 24 hours of cold fermentation, and preferably longer, especially if you want to continue to use small amount of yeast. If you can't wait that long, you can use more yeast although the finished results may not be as good. You may also find that you should use a thicker dough than Jeff uses. Otherwise, the crust can become cracker-like because of the longer bake time that you will be using in a home oven. Most people using home ovens tend to bake Caputo doughs until they get good crust coloration. Often that time is so long that the crust becomes a cracker.

One reason I like to feel the dough rather than strictly measure the percent hydration is that with feel you don't have to worry about the type of flour so much. A Caputo at 58 might feel the same as a bread flour at 62. It's the feel that I shoot for not the number. Then I vary that based on my heat, the wetter doughs for higher temps.

Caputo just does not brown that well ever. It can char, but you are just not going to see it browning that much You can even see how blond it is by looking at Da Michelle's photo on my site and the one caputo photo I have up there. I guess it could brown, if you just left it in there to dry out (not good). But I think it could have been browner than your photos.

I really think that Caputo is for 800F+ pies. If I were making pies at 600F I would definitely use bread or even AP, not Hi Gluten or 00. But to be honest, I have not tested at that temp much.

Regarding the fermentation time: The whole point of using 1/8 tspn yeast, rather than 2 tspns of yeast in many recipes, is that idea that it's going to ferment long and slow. You can dump 1/4 cup of yeast in there and it would rise if 15 minutes. But it would taste terrible. This is a true fermentation process, like making wine. After doing a cold rise for 5 days using my sourdough culture, I can open the container and it smells like wine. Wine is slow.

If you do this again, give it 1-4 days, plus several hours of counter time. pizzanyc, you cut the cold rise to 12 hours and didn't even mention what happened to the warm rise which was part of our instructions. So the dough was not ready by a long shot. You asked if the long rise was needed for caputo. The type of flour is not a factor.

I highly recommend using a container and not a zip loc. Also, oil the container and not the dough. A drop or two of oil can be spread to cover a whole container. You can kind of polish it with oil using a paper towel. But it takes a teaspoon to oil the dough. because you can't spread it so thin. Since you want to minimize the amount of oil, oil the container.

When the dough is ready, spread the dough gently. Never man handle it or remix it or combine it with other doughs or knead it or use a rolling pin to flatten it. You literally just popping the bubbles when you do any of these. At that point, it's pretty much game over. At the least, as pete said, it has to relax for an hour plus before it can be spread again. If the dough is not spreading super easily, there was a problem during mixing. You can't solve it during spreading. Go back and change the mixing procedure.

Every time I see someone on this forum buying a big bag of Caputo for use in a normal home oven it hurts. I think it's like buying a 70whatever inch plasma jumbotron TV and then sitting one foot in front of it. It's just not the right fit for a 550 degree oven.

That's one of the reasons why I often suggest that our members try out a small bag or two of the Caputo 00 Pizzeria flour from PennMac (the only place I know of that sells the Caputo Pizzeria flour in small bags) before deciding on a big bag. You might even recall some of our earliest PM exchanges in which I suggested that you use the Bel Aria 00 flour in the small bags. At that time, the only Caputo Pizzeria flour that existed was in the 25-kilo bag size and I didn't want you to take on the big bag without first knowing that it would work for your purposes. Of course, I didn't know that you were going to modify the clean cycle feature of your home oven to get much higher oven temperatures.

However, the above said, I think there are some Caputo dough formulations on the forum that produce good results in a standard home oven, although it may take some playing around with multiple stones, tiled mini-ovens, broilers, etc. to get the best results. Using natural preferments will be a big improvement over commercial yeasts, but will require a greater commitment on the part of the user. But even with commercial yeast, reasonably decent results can be achieved and, as you know, sometimes the Caputo flour can be combined with other flours, such as the KASL, to produce a quality pizza (along the lines of a DiFara clone). They won't be as good as yours or Jeff's because, as you point out, the Caputo flour is best adapted for very high oven temperature applications.

I think where most people go wrong with 00 flours is thinking that they can take an authentic Neapolitan dough formulation using Caputo 00 Pizzeria flour, or just any old 00 dough formulation, and just use it in a regular home oven. As you know, most new users, especially those who just jump in without first doing any homework, make that mistake, which is why there are perhaps more posts on the forum on failure than success with the 00 flours. In my experience, you will usually have to modify the dough formulation and the oven along the lines noted above. My advice to serious new users of the 00 flour, Caputo or otherwise, is to read the following threads in their entirety before deciding whether they really want to take on the challenges of using and mastering 00 flours in a standard home oven environment. I suspect reading the posts will cure most prospective users of the notion. But those who are serious enough and survive the ordeal should find some of the most successful formulations.

That's all true. Let me make is easier pizzanyc: if you want to make Patsy's, know that they don't use 00. They use Hi Gluten. But you will do better to try out King Arthur Bread (available in many supermarkets), than Hi Gluten. Almost all of my photos are using KA Bread or a blend of KA Bread and others.

I'm kind of glad the subject of flours has come up again because I think it is timely in light of pizzanyc's recent trials and tribulations with the Caputo 00 flour. I know from what you have written at your website that you acknowledge differences in flours but place process over types of flour based on your personal experience with the Patsy's style. But, what I have often wondered, and it came up again when I recently reread the material on flours at your website, is whether the reason why the flour differences are not as pronounced in your Patsy's crusts is because the crusts are so much thinner than other types of crusts. For example, when I make say, a Lehmann crust using different flours, I can tell the differences quite easily. They aren't as noticeable between high-gluten and bread flour, but certainly so when all-purpose flour is used. The differences are both flavor and texture. I have never made the Lehmann dough using 00 flour but I know that I would be able to tell the difference, again because of flavor and texture and also because of my long experience with 00 flours. Without doing a lot of tests using lot thinner crusts I can't say that the differences would be less pronounced, but it seems to me that the differences would be more subtle with much thinner crusts. Even then, I suspect that I would have a favorite flour, maybe based on flavor rather than texture, just as you seem to prefer the KA bread flour or KA bread flour blends for your Patsy's crusts.

It also occurs to me that when very thin crusts are used, the sauce, cheeses and toppings are more likely to come to the fore, and especially so when they are of the extraordinarily high level of quality that you work so hard to achieve. In a way, it is somewhat like what Dom DeMarco does with his pizzas except that I know that your crusts will be superior to his crusts, which are based on only1-2 hours of dough fermentation. Your sauces and cheeses may even be better than his and take attention away from the crusts. Not entirely, of course.

I might add that, for me, cost and availability are not issues in flour selection because I can get the KASL or All Trumps cheaply from a local distributor, and for not much more than the cost of all-purpose flour. I normally use the high-gluten flours because that is what many operators use to make a standard NY street style, and that was the flour that was selected for use in the original Lehmann dough formulation which I have spent so much time with, just as you have with the Patsy's dough formulation.

Let me take a stab at it. First, let me say (again) that my emphasis on technique is not to say that there are no flour differences, just that these differences are not going to make or break you, because any good brand can be turned into a very good pie and conversly bad technique cannot be overcome with good flour. I think the flour game is for the highly experienced. It's funny, because I've gotten slammed for repeating this over and over with many arguing about the differences (as if I EVER said that they are identical) and yet you see the problem repeated when pizzanyc asks "is waiting 1 - 4 days really necessary with caputo flour?" There's this pervasive thought that you just get the right ingredients and that's going to solve it.

I don't really know much about making thick doughs. I've been making my grandmother's sicilian pizza since I was a kid, but I never did it as good as she did. I used to buy dough around the corner where I grew up in the Bronx and then make her pie. I never even thought about making my own dough back then. My mother and I would wonder why sometimes the dough spread easily and othertimes it fought us and we could never spread it. The bottom of the pan had so much oil, that if the dough wanted to pull back, it would just shrink to half a pan and you could fight it all day and get nowhere. We thought it was how we let the dough rise, or something we did. Now I realize that it was how it was mixed and we had no chance to fix it - it was pot luck. I tried once or twice in the past 3 years to try to make her pie from scratch but I had limited success. I will someday put in the effort. I'm 90% sure that she used regular AP, probably whatever brand they had in the supermarket, regular yeast, hand knead with a short warm rise, just a few hours. But that pie was incredible. She had that Grandma knowledge. Another triumph of technique over ingredients. She was born and raised in Naples. She's 95 years old now, and she can't really teach me anymore, unfortunately.

Ok, I'm babbling. I guess I'm not really sure of the answer pete. I can taste a difference with an all Caputo pie, even a thin one. I don't love it. But I like it a lot better when Anthonly at UPN uses it. Let me go a step further. I think that Caputo is not only for 800F, but also for wood or coal ovens. I think this is one of those areas where my 800F electric falls short of a brick oven.

Thanks. Even with the NY style, Evelyne Slomon has mentioned using all-purpose flour. When I first tried it for the Lehmann NY style, I was looking for an entry level dough that a beginner could use or if bread flour or high-gluten flour wasn't available for any reason. I found that I didn't like the results. After some experimentation, I found that if I added vital wheat gluten and dried dairy whey to the all-purpose flour, I could get results that I liked much better than all-purpose flour alone, and closer to the higher-gluten versions. Maybe it is just that I had a different benchmark. From the beginning, and for most of the subsequent versions, I used high-gluten flour for the Lehmann doughs. When Evelyne's pizza book was published in 1984, she used all-purpose flour in her basic dough recipes, including for the NY style. Back then, the higher gluten flours were not as readily available as they are now, and maybe not at all at the retail level for the highest-gluten flours. Even apart from that, Evelyne may have just liked the results from using all-purpose doughs better. We all end up with favorites for all kinds of reasons.

Interestingly, even back then, Evelyne talked about cold fermentation, using hand shaping and the other traditional techniques for making pizza dough--essentially the same ones that you and most of our members use. As you have pointed out at your website, most published recipes for pizza dough look alike and call for lots of yeast, one or two room-temperature rises and punchdowns, and then shaping, dressing and baking. Cold fermentation is only occasionally mentioned and even then it is usually for fairly short periods. It doesn't seem like we have made a great deal of progress in perfecting our doughs since Evelyne published her book almost 22 years ago.

Wasn't Evelyne saying that the old guys used 12-12.5% flour. This would equate to KA Bread. Then their descendents moved to Hi Gluten, sugar, oil, etc. later. As probably the only real Bread flour advocate here, I found that interesting.

I think if you tried AP now, using a longer mix to more fully develop the gluten, plus all the knowledge you have now, you'd be happier with it. It think that a lot of people start out with AP, because they don't know about the other flours, then switch as they learn more and as their technique improves, they credit the improvement to the flour. But a lot of the improvement is the new technique.

You are correct. I also stand corrected on the bread flour as far as Evelyne's dough recipes in her book are concerned. They call for either bread flour or all-purpose flour. Evelyne indicates in her book that bread flour was the choice of commercial pizzerias. Her personal choice now is 12% certified organic flour.

BTW, scott r is also a big proponent of the KA bread flour although, of course, he also likes the Caputo flour.

Jeff, It is hard for me to say that I really achieve 800. Most of my pies are 2 minutes exactly. Is that your speed? I have always had a sneaking suspicion that your oven is a bit hotter than mine, and I know that could effect my choice of flours.

In my oven, for 2 minute pies I usually prefer to go with a blend of Caputo and KASL flour. I use more KASL than you use bread. Roughly 20%. Lately I have been working with straight San Filece flour, and that is excellent as well. I think that those two choices, plus your 50/50 blend of Caputo and bread all produce pies that are top notch.

Like you, I am a huge fan of KA bread flour. I think it is the ultimate universal flour for making killer pies at all temps. As a bonus, I can find it anywhere. I am planning on getting to know the organic Guisto bread flour soon as well.

My oven will hit 1000F, but I never get it that hot. My times really vary a lot because I'm always running some test or other. The hottest I've probably done is 870, with a super wet caputo pie. That was well under 2 minutes. But usually I'm in the 2:30 range. I don't subsribe to "the hotter the better". I once posted that I was dropping my official recommendation from 825 to 790. I then immediately began getting sucked into all the posts talking about 90 second, 60 seconds, 30 seconds. I tried a lot of higher temps. But lately I'm back again to 2:30 or even 3:00 pies, which is back into the 790 range. The super hot pies are a little too soft for me. I like my pie light, but not necessarily soft. Johnny's is a great example of a pie that is super light, but not soft at all.

This is one of those areas where I think that as my dough technique improves, I can lighten up on the extreme heat and still get good results. I've timed Patsy's at over 4 minutes and Johnny's is closer to 5. But until recently never had good results in those ranges. I made a 4 minute pie last week. I had let the oven cool off and the last of the batch of 6 took about 4 minutes. It was every bit as good as the first pie which was 2:15, probably better.

I may have some major edits to my site about this soon.

I might be putting the cart before the horse here, but I had a long conversation with a local restaurant owner who just opened a pizza place. His other restaurants are among my favorites in town, but I had the pizza and it was pretty average for Atlanta. He is coming over in a few days to try my pies and he seems amenable to some coaching. I don't know his heat situation, but I suspect it's not 800F. If he needs to make a lower temp pie and he's open to coaching, I may begin a major effort to try to reverse engineer Johnny's. Someone posted a photo of Joe & Pat's on Staten Island, which looks a lot like a Johnny's pie to me:

It's not Marco's 60 second neo, but such a pie would be a huge step up for Atlanta.

Twice in the last year I made a 700F pie and thought that it had glimmers of the Johnny's texture. It was enough to make me think a Johnny's reverse engineer is within grasp. I'm pretty sure I'd need a new culture. Scott, you are in the area of Johnny's is that right?

re autolyse times: I've only done from 3-10 pies in a batch, and it seems the same. I think that for very large batches, you might have to do the initial mix a bit longer before starting the autolyse, just to make sure the flour is all incorporated.

Actually, I was wondering if the initial time needs to be 20 minutes. I've done it for as long as an hour, but I think I want to test 10 and 15 and see what happens. I'd love to shorten this whole thing up. The post-mix time of 20 minutes I feel pretty good about.

Jeff & Scott, I think you will both be very happy with the giusto's high gluten once it arrives. I've been using it for the last 4 months and I can't imagine going back. For me, it produces a light chewy interior with a nice crusty exterior. I too have taken my cook times from the 90 second range to about 3:30 now days. I love the charred flavor that accompanies a 90 second bake but I would rather have a slight crunch in the dough and that's what I get from a 3:30 bake time. I've tried KASL, KABF & Caputo and so far the Giusto's is definitely my favorite. Just as an FYI, my hydration is typically around 54-55%. I'm anxious to hear what each of you think about the Giusto's. Pete G.

I might be putting the cart before the horse here, but I had a long conversation with a local restaurant owner who just opened a pizza place. His other restaurants are among my favorites in town, but I had the pizza and it was pretty average for Atlanta. He is coming over in a few days to try my pies and he seems amenable to some coaching. I don't know his heat situation, but I suspect it's not 800F. If he needs to make a lower temp pie and he's open to coaching, I may begin a major effort to try to reverse engineer Johnny's.

What's the new pizza place and who is the restaurateur? Let me know when his pizzas meet with your approval. I always want to recommend a good pizza for my friends. I also would like to eat a great pizza out on occasion.

He said it was way better than anything in town and one of the best he's ever had. His wife said it was the best pizza she's ever had. Now we have to see if that translates into any action... I'm not going to say much. We'll have to see.

I just read Pete's post regarding my use of all-purpose flour back in The Pizza Book, yes, I did recommend using all-purpose and the brand I used to test the book was Heckers which had a protein content of 12 1/2 to 13 %. Even then, I called for using a lower protein flour in the vein of what was used in Italy. The only pizza maker I knew who was using a lower protein flour was Jerry Pero of Totonno's. Everyone else was using an all-trumps high gluten flour which was not sold as a pizza flour, it was a flour that was recommended for crusty breads, rolls and--hearth style pizza. In NYC it was the pizza flour of choice to some of the best pizzerias around, but outside of New York, it was just plain old bread flour-that could be used to make pizza. Except for the Northeast and New York area, local pizza makers used flours that were more localized and that had lower protein content. In the South or Mid-west. the regional tastes for flour and baked products required slightly lower protein, softer flours. For example, in Chicago a high gluten flour would have been 12-12.50%. Because it was so difficult to advise people, I tried sticking to national millers where I could get reliable specs and that the flour would be readily available. There was no where near the choice of today.

The commercial flour that the NY guys were using was very high in protein 14-14.50%--and sometimes higher. Retail bread flour from General Mills or Pillsbury was more like 13.50-14.00% which was about as close as could be gotten to resemble the flours employed by the pizza masters. However, "pizza" flour was pretty popular with many pizzerias. They used "Pizza" flour which was a product purchased from a distributor--under the distributors private label. Not only were these flours inconsistent, but their specs were always wrong because the distributors were routinely purchasing flour from the cheapest source, so the flours varied wildly. The other turn off was that the flours were loaded with artificial stuff, they had a very long list of ingredients on the side of the bag-most of which were chemical. There was a lot more in those flours than the all purpose or high gluten flours I was using, so, I never touched the stuff. In those days the use of extenders in all aspects of pizza making from tomato extenders, cheese extenders and flour fillers were what everyone was into--yuck! The precursor magazine (which I had a subscription to for about 5 years) Pizza Maker Monthly, was chock full of all kinds of nasty things to go on top or into pizza--it was all about artificial ingredients back then. Except of course for the few dinosaurs around who still used real stuff for their pizza. Making great pizza--with pure and natural ingredients was a real challenge.

I must also say that I was under a lot of constraints from Times Books, my publisher. They felt that if recipes were too time consuming or esoteric that the book would not sell. They made the call on a lot of the information I wanted to present. For example, the New York Style recipe originally called for 1/8 teaspoon of yeast and a 24 hour fermentation. My editor thought that was too complicated and too time consuming--afterall, who wanted to wait 24 hours to eat pizza! So, they had me change the recipe. Their big thing was the recent success of Craig Claiborne and Pierre Franney's 30 Minute Gourmet. They believed that no one wanted to spend more than that amount of time in the kitchen. They wanted me to include a 30 minute recipe for pizza from the very first interview I had with them. I know that if I had told them that I couldn't come up with a pizza that could be made in 30 minutes that they wouldn't have let me do the book--they were so obsessed with this 30 minute thing. There was so much history and stories and lots of commercial information that was never to be included. I was lucky I got in as much as I did, but it was a real battle. It was my first book and I was an unknown writer, so my clout was nil.

Pizza making back in the late seventies (which is when I researched a lot of The Pizza Book was really pretty weird--people were really secretive about everything they did and what they used. The old-timers were very open with me because they had nothing to hide and they thought I would never be able to "get it"--they were so wrong about that! But most of the pizza makers back then were using inferior ingredients and artificial stuff, and they did not want the general public to know that. I would recognize the products when I went to their stores and I soon learned to shut up because once I mentioned those products, the interview would be over. It was like the stuff was some big secret and the patron was too dumb or lacked the taste to tell the difference. I was often told that people couldn't tell the difference so why bother? Which is what inspired me all the more to write the book.

If I had to characterize the late seventies and early eighties (before California pizza) I would call it the Age of Ignorance and Bad Pizza.

Google recently introduced a new news archival service by which old articles can be searched and reviewed (sometimes under a paid subscription), including by bracketed time periods. I did a search recently for articles in which high-gluten flour was used for pizza dough back in the 80s, when you were working on your pizza book. There were very few references to using high-gluten flour, although there were a few references in the New York Times about using Hecker's flour, which the NYT considered to be a "high gluten" flour. I found references to high gluten flour for breads and bagels, but not for pizza dough based on flours with over 14% protein. It seems that it was in the late 80s and later that the higher protein high-gluten flours came into vogue for pizza making and were discussed in the media.